Promoting multiculturalism

By Ananta Kumar Giri

ESTABLISHING MULTICULTURAL societies is an important task of democratic mobilisation and transformation today. A multicultural society is one of mutual and multiple recognitions where individuals are neither subjected to the tyrannies of compulsive cultural traditions nor cultural groups subjected to the tyranny of either the state or a dominant group within it. It is a decent society where there is a continued effort to eliminate humiliation and institute rights and dignity in the lives of individuals and groups. It is a society which is respectful of both its internal as well as external other, one which is animated by reaching out to the other with grace, love and participation.

But in contemporary Indian society, there is a reverse movement where there is a process of othering at work where even those who are within the space of our nation-state-society are one by one being made an excluded other. The Shiv Sena chief, Mr. Bal Thackeray's statement that Muslims should be disenfranchised and the violence against Christians are a dark reminder of the urgency of renewing our commitment to building a multicultural society - a society of multiple recognitions and inclusion of the other.

A multicultural society is a learning society where different cultures and individuals seek to learn from each other and in the process are also open to mutual criticism and transformation. But in contemporary Indian society we see a growing and persistent refusal to learn which becomes quite clear when we look at identity politics in the fields of caste and religion. The Dalit movements today continue to be bound to an anti-Brahminical logic and do not explore the task of reconstruction and self-criticism outside of the villainous construction of the Brahminical other. It is now universally recognised that education is crucial for human development and Ambedkar himself had placed a key emphasis on education for the emancipation of Dalits. But in inculcating the habits of education, Dalits who are almost always first generation learners, can learn from the life-practices of Brahmins. Dalits can learn the habits of education from Brahmins as Brahminical castes can learnt the art of labour from the Dalits.

Such a mutual learning can facilitate the intertwining of mental learning and manual labour in both Brahmins and Dalits and this can also facilitate the transcendence of their categorical identities. But this is not possible as long as protagonists of Dalit politics stick to ``Dalitisation'' as the sole route to emancipation, and Brahminical sociologists look at any effort at human improvement as an instance of ``Sanskritisation'' and offer it as the sole model of social and cultural development. Multiculturalism as a project of learning in the lives of individuals and communities privileges neither ``Dalitisation'' nor ``Sanskritisation'' but is animated by a dialectic of self- realisation.

The same problem of refusal to learn and an arrogance to kill the other, which poses a challenge to our self-secured identity, is witnessed in the contemporary identity politics of religion. Attacks on Christian missionaries and communities have been a barbaric and tragic part of the religion-based identity politics in our country. But such attacks reflect, at a deeper level, the envy and jealousy that some belligerent Hindu organisations have towards the services rendered by some Christian organisations and their unwillingness to learn from such ethical engagement and to make Hinduism and several of its institutions undertake more service activities. This challenge of learning and self-criticism becomes clear in what a senior citizen of Baripada, Orissa, who is himself a Hindu, said ``We Hindus spend all our energies in observing so many festivals, and now collecting donations for these has become a thriving industry. The wealthy Hindus of the town put their money in building temples but they will not spend a rupee in undertaking service activities in the city what to speak of going out to remote tribal areas as Christian missionaries do.''

Similar is the approach of the self-study movement of Swadhyaya, a movement of practical spirituality from within contemporary Hinduism. For Swadhyaya, Hindus must learn from Christian missionaries to work among the unreached and downtrodden; in its work Swadhyaya continues to exemplify this as it works among the tribals of Gujarat and Maharashtra and with other downtrodden communities. And as Hindus learn from Christians, Christians and Christian missionaries also can learn from the Hindus that there are many ways to God and not one and also understand the difficulties and anxieties that many Hindus, not just Hindutva fundamentalist forces, have about conversion. As Felix Wilfred, himself a passionate Christian, writes in his recent ``Asian Dreams and Christian Hopes'': ``Many Christians may dispute how founded are the fears of our neighbours regarding conversion and how much it may be substantiated by hard facts. But the fact is that there is such a widespread impression that Christians are concerned about increasing their numerical strength in addition to the power and influence they already wield in terms of their institutions and foreign flow of funds. Such impressions create a lot of difficulties in our mutual relationship.'' In this context, Wilfred urges our Christian brothers and sisters to develop a ``relational language, ending the epoch of the language of isolation,'' participate in civil society, and make their service organisations accessible to the public and open to democratic community control.

But such a project of learning and self-criticism requires the art of listening on the part of the participants rather than just assertion and valourisation of one's identity which is the case most of the time. In fact, assertion of identities in identity politics of our times has led to ethnic cleansing and annihilation of the other from Assam to Rwanda. This provides us a picture of the limits of identity politics for the realisation of multiculturalism but exploration of its limits urges us to realise not only the limits of assertive identitarian groups such as ULFA within the nation-state but also understand the limits of nation-state as a taken-for-granted ultimate frame of our identity. As anthropologist Gerd Baumann challenges us: ``The nation-state... is not simply the neutral arena within which the multicultural dream can be realised; rather, it is itself one of the problems.'' Therefore, the project of multiculturalism calls for a project of post-conventional and post-national identity formation where religion, ethnicity and nation-state as conventional bases of identity formation are related to dialogically and critically rather than in terms of valourised identity mobilisation.

The building of a multicultural society calls for continued democratic struggles and spiritual strivings. Along with listening, it calls for an ability to identify with the suffering of each other and through this understand each other more capaciously and graciously and contribute to the building of a nurturant common future. Identification with suffering requires much more than the valourisation of identity politics and the production of triumphant memory and history which do not seek to forgive, reconcile and participate in overcoming the logic of contemporary bindings.

(The writer is on the faculty of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai).

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